Friday, November 29, 2013

A Poison Chalice

"[The agreement] virtually guarantees continued and increased brutalities against the people of Iran, increased political incarcerations, more tortures, and more executions without any fear of backlash from the Western democracies.""The petrochemical, automobile and precious metals businesses and markets inside Iran are virtually owned and controlled by the Revolutionary Guards' apparatus: [Supreme Leader Ayatollah] Khamenei and his close circle of thugs." Iman Foroutan, spokesman, Iranian expatriate group The New Iran

"[The Saudis, Kuwaitis and other Gulf states fearing a nuclear Iran would] buy equivalent technologies to redress this grand strategic imbalance, thus triggering yet another regional arms race of a grander and more dangerous calibre and magnitude.""...Not all [nuclear] sites are inspected daily and none of the engineering sites are included in the agreement." Sami-Al-Farej, head, Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies

That's the view from the mindful and knowledgeable expatriates who escaped the pervasive fanaticism and persecution meted out by the Republic's ruling Ayatollahs, enforced by the Republican Guard, concerned about the future of the country they left behind, and the fate that awaits the population, inclusive of their extended families. Their concern is that of an atrociously abusive government, a known threat to its neighbours, possessing the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

The ancient Middle East with its ancient tribal animosities and its traditional sectarian divides that dissolved into a more brutalized active bloodletting with the advance of jihadi martyrdom under the mass insanity of fundamentalist Salafist and Shia Islamism, has always presented as a volatile human powder keg. That powder keg has been kick-started toward a mass conflagration by the restlessness instanced by what appeared innocently enough as an "Arab Spring", and which has morphed into a springboard for fundamentalist Islamism.

The international community has found it relaxing to exhale its suspense in anticipation of growing crises. As though signing on to an initial negotiating formula with a totalitarian government which continues to insist on its sovereign and religious entitlements to threaten whom it will, and to support those threats with the realpolitik of accomplishing its goal of achieving nuclear warheads and the powerful ballistic missiles required to send them the distances considered to do the most good for their malevolent cause, is a matter of huge relief.

If one discounts the potential for a tsunami of death raining down from the skies and a mangled disruption of civil infrastructure, and concentrates only on the more immediate prospect of conducting profitable business and trade with an enterprising, scheming government with its own eye on assembling the funding it requires to reach its goal, while disarming the concerns of doubters, then the profit motive that European and Asian and North American profiteers are salivating at has created a boon.

None of this can be perceived in the messages emanating from the disaffected hardliners in Tehran not singing from the same playbook as the administration, or alternatively, coached to sing off key for the purpose of further distracting and disarming their detractors suspicious of their motives in the final analysis.

"It practically tramples on Iran's enrichment rights... Uranium enrichment restrictions in the final stage and constraints in the first stage mean that enrichment in Iran is headed toward self shutdown", wailed lawmaker Ruhollah Hosseinina; the deal too vague for his liking, so conditional it threatened to a shutting down of Iran's invaluable enrichment program.

Not to worry; in stepped foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, noting some construction will continue at the planned Arak heavy water reactor. That is the site whose focus in the negotiations was to be completely shut down. Minor progress, he assured his critics in Tehran, could continue. A statement that appears in flagrant violation of the co-signed agreement, but obviously reassuring to those who believe no element in Iran's nuclear program should be consigned to the demands of foreigners.

Arak nuclear heavy water plant - Associated Press

American State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, however, parsed Mr. Zarif's statement, stressing that capacity will not increase at the Arak site. "It means no nuclear fuel will be produced and no installations will be installed, but construction will continue there. We're not sure exactly what he means by 'construction'. "But there will be no work on the reactor itself, no work to prepare fuel for the reactor or do additional testing of the reactor."

This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.